I definitely don't connect to any celebrity other than those I admire for their intelligence and/or skill. So I'm not normal.
Being a celebrity is mostly a way to make money. And with influencers, the "career progression" that almost every upstart vlogger/instagrammer aspires to is pretty well-defined:
1) Provide some kind of entertainment content as a vector to push other people's crap
2) Over time, build up your user base and revenue base, until you become a well-known brand in a given market segment
3) Transition to pushing your own crap, e.g. a line of products with your name on it
Of course, selection is very strong there. Most would-be influencers spend years and fail at step 1. Few achieve step 3. And it can't really be any different, because attention economy is the ultimate zero-sum game: people have only so much hours in the day.
We evolved to compare ourselves to others in order to elevate the fitness of ourselves and our in-group. We look to peers. We take an interest in their gossip. We look at beautiful people, smart people, successful people. We're curious. We're also intrigued by scandalous and dangerous people. It's how we update our mental model of the world and contrast ourselves against it.
I'd be utterly shocked if you didn't, at some level, take an interest in the personal details of some person you don't know.
Virtual celebrities and influencers provide the same sort of dopamine hits that their real life counterparts do, except they can be 100% controlled by a corporation.
You don't even have to look at virtual influencers to know that people will eat them up: lots of people are already addicted to fictional characters. Movies, super heroes, even cartoons and anime. They find pieces of themselves in it. They start to care and take deep interest.
Virtual celebs are the future, and a cottage industry is already cropping up in support of it.
And just wait until people use AR/VR to optimize their own appearances and behaviors.